[T]he most spectacular party piece of all in this novel whose groaning feast brings to mind a fantastical curiosity cabinet is Thomas Pynchon's tribute to the technological adventure literature of the turn of the twentieth century: the "Chums of Chance," five aeronauts on board the "Inconvenience". Pynchon grants them perhaps the loveliest happy end in modern literature. "They fly toward grace," is the last sentence of the novel. A flight no reader should miss.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon:
For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know . . . it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace.
Sophie Ratcliffe:
This sounds like classic Pynchon, but there is something newly visible. The cadences are so lulling that it would be easy to see this as, if not celebration, an endearing closing sentimentality. But on a closer look, the final scene has disturbing resonances, as if a crew of Boy’s Own suicide bombers were setting out on a self-effacing mission to destruct. Of all the attempted explosions in the book, this is the biggest.
